Mafia Guide
This guide, written by Unreality, is a helpful way to learn the basic rules and roles of the game, Mafia. Mafia Guide What is Mafia? Mafia is an epic game of skill, persuasion, deception, strategy, participation, cruelty and cunning. It is a contest of wits; a championship of cleverness. It is intense, unforgiving, relentless, dominating and amazing. Some people have had Mafia dreams. Some people drive across the city to get better wireless to play Mafia. People ignore their workload to play Mafia. Mafia is addicting. Mafia is fun. Mafia is wickedly cool, awesome and pulse-poundingly exciting. If a game is designed well and hosted well and played well, it can be a work of art. Mafia is like a riddle, much like the ones on Brainden, but it is so much more than a riddle: so much more work, dedication, skill and toughness goes into a game of Mafia than any one puzzle. How well can you deduce people's roles while retaining your own identity? How can you maximize your potential to help your team and meet your win condition? Mafia takes skill, but luckily is easy to learn and easy to become skillful. A gradual curve and focus on strategy allows basically anyone to play and enjoy Mafia, and even vanquish foes that are much more experienced than yourselves! That's why Mafia is a great game. Mafia involves teamwork. Except for individual roles, you are part of a team. In generalized Mafia, the goal of your team is to kill the other team. Yes, kill Mafia (in its most basic game-theory formula) is a game of elimination. People die. Everyone has died in a game of Mafia - many times a brutal or gruesome death ;P It's all part of the game, don't worry if you die. Especially if you die first, our sympathies are with you. Don't be sad, don't be mad - just root on your team and make sure not to BTSC or affect the game further in any way ;D In essence, Mafia involves an Italian village, where a local mafia gang has set up shop. They are killing off the villagers, one villager per night. The Mafia members can talk to each other secretly behind-the-scenes! This is called behind-the-scenes-contact, or BTSC. The villagers, angry and afraid, gather each day in the town square to lynch (execute) one person among them popular vote. The lynched person is killed and their role revealed: were they a baddie - a Mafioso? If so, yippee! One dead Mafioso closer to a safe village. If the lynched person was a fellow villager... then uh oh Remember that the Mafiosos are masquerading as normal Innocents, and are influencing the vote in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways, trying to manipulate the masses and get an Innocent (a villager) voted out as opposed to a member of the Mafia. So when playing, you have to be careful and watch out for the Mafiosos among you trying to influence the vote... Usually there are various types of people working for the villagers: for example, a Doctor can choose one person each night. If the person is attacked by the Mafia, the Doctor saves them. etc. This is called a role, and is a key part of Mafia games. In a "vanilla" game, most people may be bland villagers ("vanilla" innocents) and important roles are scarce, but the trend in recent mafia games has been extensively themed (far from that original Italian village) and each player has a significant, possibly game-changing role. Nobody is left out. All roles should be awesome ;P So, at night, the Mafia kills (along with other various night actions from roles such as Doctors). By day, a vote-based lynching occurs... this is accompanied with huge amounts of discussion, accusations, deception, lying, deceit, fraud, and dishonesty Trust no-one and always be on your watch. The common goal is to catch the baddies, but there are baddies lurking among you... baddies who are trying to manipulate you into thinking someone else is a baddie! This is the core of Mafia. As you can see, it's an intense and excellent game. All the hype is real. This guide will tell you everything you need to know... Factions & Win Conditions Factions A faction is a group of players that are on the same side (using the Italian village example: the villagers, or Innocents, are a faction, and the Mafia is another faction). A faction can have various overall properties: * BTSC: BTSC stands for Behind-the-Scenes-Contact, and refers to the ability to chat with members of the same faction, using PMs (Private Messages) or some other form of contact set up by the host or players - for example, a system where members of a BTSC group get a separate secret forum to discuss on ** Typically the Mafia, or other similar baddie groups, have BTSC while the Innocent faction does NOT (the innocent faction NEVER does, except for occasionally a few people within the faction that have BTSC, but that's not a faction-wide ability). Mafia is defined in game theory by an "informed minority" ('the bad guys') and an "uninformed majority" ('the good guys') * Nightkill: the other common faction ability is the ability to kill one player per night. The kill is usually preventable by saving roles (such as a Doctor) and is the basis for eliminating Innocents the faction that usually has this ability is the baddie faction(s). The Innocents will never have this ability, as usually it requires the group to also have BTSC ~ rarely, the Nightkill can be part of a faction without BTSC, if each faction member "votes" for their target (similar to the wererats in Medieval Mafia), but that's more complicated These are the only two factionwide abilities: any others are rare and special cases. Usually a nightkill is decided by the group's members chatting (via BTSC) and coming to a consensus (ie, a decision on who to kill) Win Conditions If each faction is like a team, how do they win? Each team is pitted against each other. Each faction is technically enemies with the others (although some factions may have alliances and whatnot) and has a separate win condition. A win condition is a situation/goal/condition that has to be met to win the game... ie, kill all others, or kill specific player, or do something, or do this, or do that, etc Typical Factions * A large majority faction - These are the "good guys", the Innocents, the Villagers, the Townsfolk, the Jumpers, the Adventurers, what have you - it depends on the game. This faction makes up the majority of the players (eeeasily) and usually has the goal of killing all "baddies" (the common name for members of factions not aligned with the majority faction) * One or more baddie factions - They are usually small (3 to 5 people, depending on the game and the number of factions & players) and have BTSC and nightkill abilities. Their goals range from killing everyone else to killing a specific range of people or something of that sort * Specialized baddies - May or MAY NOT appear in games. Examples: QAs from early Mafia games I hosted, Phages in a recent game I suggested, or the Golden Scourge from Medieval Mafia. These specialized baddie factions are usually very small - 2 players, sometimes 3 at the most - that have a very specific and sometimes complicated goal as baddies * Independent factions - Independent roles are people that stand alone - they are flying solo, and each independent role has its own independent faction & win condition of course. Independent roles tend to be unique, flambuoyant, rememberable - and harder to play, yet more rewarding Basic Rules Night & Day The game moves in cycles of NIGHT and DAY. While there may be exceptions, night usually happens first, then it alternates, worded like this: Night One, Day One, Night Two, Day Two, Night Three, Day Three, etc... During night, conversation on the thread is limited, although BTSC conversation (usually between baddies) is flaring like a live wire as people decide the night actions they're going to do. Most mafia games have many night-active roles, and quite a lot of things happen in a single night. Not all of it goes into the night post, and much is kept hidden and behind the scenes (for example, who spy-roles spy on). Usually hosts set time limits on night (18-24 hours is a typical range), though if they get all the night PMs in before that, they will post the night post earlier as soon as they can, sometimes even a bit after the deadline. This is a good standard I set for the very first BD mafia games and it's worked ever since. Days for a normal-length mafia game are always 24 hours, ALWAYS. Regardless of whether the host is there or not, the day ends. Not earlier (except for a special case, see below), and not later. At the end of each night & day, the host makes a "night post" or "day post", which chronicles (usually in story form) the events that happened that are now publicly known during the night/day. They then update the roster with new deaths & developments and announce the following day/night phase and when it ends Voting Voting is at the heart of Mafia. How does it work? Well, when I first encountered Mafia, it was on a site called Lostpedia. The moderators were very involved in the game, so there was a live poll built into the thread where you would cast your vote. At each new day, a new topic would be made with a new poll and the mods would merge it into the thread for the new session of voting & discussing. However, this wasn't the easiest to read and understand quickly, and once you voted... you couldn't take it back or change your vote unthinkable in our play style. When I brought Mafia to Brainden (with some of my own touches), one of the things I had to change was the voting system. So I came up with the roster-based system, and it works like this: Host: name 1) Name 2) Name 3) Name 4) etc When you are voting for someone, you repost the ABSOLUTE MOST CURRENT roster with the following added (say you are person #2) Host: name 1) Name 2) Name - voting for Name_of_vote_target 3) Name 4) etc Remember, you are voting to CONDEMN someone. If you are the first to vote for them in the day, make up a new color (preferably different enough from all colors currently displayed on the roster). If someone else has already voted for the person in question, use the exact same color!! This makes it very easy to assess the situation As you know, days are a set time of 24 hours. At the end, the lynched person is decided. Usually it's the person with the most votes; the host will specify in the beginning of the game. They should also specify what happens in the event of a tie. The only way that the day can officially end earlier is if someone pleads no-contest. It's basically saying "okay, you got me, I'm guilty, I'm a bad guy, lynch me already". To do this, the votes have to be overwhelmingly in favor of lynching said baddie. If someone pleads no-contest, the host will probably make the day post as soon as they can BTSC BTSC = Behind The Scenes Contact Forms of BTSC: * PMing * host-setup method of communication (such as secret BTSC forums) * player-setup method of communication (AIM, MSN, email, etc) * talking irl (in real life) about the game, if you know another player irl Note that BTSC is almost always NEVER ALLOWED! Do NOT EVER btsc with ANYONE unless EXPLICITLY told BY THE HOST that you are allowed to. Nobody cheats in Mafia. People find out, and you are basically exiled. If you PM somebody about the game, usually they will lightly warn you that BTSC is not allowed, or possibly tell the host immediately. Either way, BTSC serves no actual purpose because nobody trusts anybody and it's likely to make you more suspicious and possibly get you killed within the next phase. So even if BTSC was allowed in a game (it won't be), nobody would use it. Bottom line: don't BTSC unless it was explicitly allowed for you First, what exactly counts as BTSC? Of course you can PM and chat to your friends, even if they are playing in the same Mafia game. But you can't discuss strategy, roles, events, desires about the game, ANYTHING. Anything that conveys information, probes for information, etc. No letting slip your opinion on the lynch vote during an AIM conversation. I find that that's the most common form of "accidental BTSC" Roles with BTSC: * baddie factions generally have BTSC as a group-wide ability. This means that all members in the faction can chat with each other * sometimes, two members of the majority faction ("the Innocents") get BTSC as a special part of their roles. Or sometimes they don't start out with the BTSC but have the possibility of obtaining it. All of this will be described by the host, so only use BTSC if you're sure Another form of BTSC is where the host may slip information, whether by accident or on purpose - this is covered more in section VII.